The jury for The Hindu Prize 2016 said this of Anil Menon’s Half of What I Say : “This work is a meta-narrative on the bizarre forces that operate overtly and covertly, impacting the very fabric of our social, cultural and political life.” And Menon concedes that real-life events have begun to reflect those in his novel. Excerpts from an interview:
What was your reaction to the nomination?
I was delighted, of course. But I also know there’s a long list of people behind this moment. For instance, my editor Himanjali Sankar. She was an early champion of the novel. I was also really moved by the outpouring of affection from my friends. Otherwise, life is back to normal.
I still have to wait in queues, make a good first impression, and so on.
How happy are you with the journey of this book?
I don’t know where it is going really. E.M. Forster was once asked why he couldn’t finish a certain story and he said he’d put his lead characters on a train and they never came back. I feel the same way about this novel. I get emails once in a while, but God knows where the damn thing is headed. Still, as long as it is knocking about the world, I’m happy.
Your book is not just one story, but a many-branched tree, green, and fecund. How tough was containing your stories within, and what was your technique?
It took many rewrites to get to a point where I was willing to show the novel to people. There is only one technique to write a novel. You have to break it up into manageable pieces. Trouble is, the “it” keeps evolving. When you fix one piece, something else tends to go out of whack. If that’s happening at the beginning, it’s not a good sign. But it’s an excellent sign later on. The early rewrites should be easy, then they should get harder and harder. When it gets impossible, you are done.
How political is Half of What I Say ?
The novel is a political romance, but it does not have just one politics or just one notion of love. As regards the writing, my mind and hands were not always on the same page, so to speak. The mind planned to say one thing and the hand would write something else. There were frequent misrecognitions of intent. Fortunately, I knew enough to let the couple sort it out. So the process was both spontaneous and well-planned.
Bans, academics, anti-corruption movement, how contemporary is the novel?
It is a bit eerie how events have begun to reflect those in the novel. I began writing the novel six years ago. At the time, Anna Hazare had just captured the nation’s imagination with his anti-corruption movement. I was totally fascinated by the propaganda, counter-propaganda, the passions it aroused. It was clear what the people didn’t want: corruption. But it wasn’t clear what they did want. They were united by a common negative, and that unity was fuelled by an extravagant suspension of disbelief. In other words, they were being led by a story. It made me very uneasy. Modern tyrannies are often mass movements gone terribly wrong. I started to think about what stories do, about how we misrecognise objects of our desire, and about a political regime that took stories seriously. To the extent these ideas are ever-present in our body politic, the novel reflects contemporary India.
The title comes from Gibran, right? Or is it from Beatles and ‘Julia’?
Yes, the title is from Gibran’s Sand and Foam . John Lennon got it from there too. I cannot control how you’ll read the story and you cannot control how I wrote it. If I could control your response, I would find another profession. If you could control mine, what I have to say would just be your echo. At the heart of storytelling lies this primitive freedom. It’s a freedom that shapes all our arrangements; that is, it is a political freedom.
A simpler expanation is that my wonderful editor Himanjali and I were racking our brains with what to call the damn thing. This title bubbled up.
How committed and responsive do you think a writer should be to society and the contemporary events shaping it?
Whatever else a story may be, it is first and foremost an aesthetic act. Another way to say this is that no story is necessary. Nor is a story ever sufficient. There are many ways to silence and ruin a writer. Forcing moral obligations on them is an excellent method. I recommend it to the attention of tyrants everywhere.
The cover is unique and has been hailed.
The novel chases a lot of rabbits. Plus, I am finicky when it comes to book covers. So Bhavana Singh had a really tough task. But she came up with a brilliant design. On one level, it’s perfectly straightforward, but then your peepers have to double-check and triple-check. I love it.
Your book has a ‘genre-bending’ tag. What is your position on ‘genre’?
I am okay with the idea of genre as a classification of writing, but not writers. Ideally, the story determines the genre, not the other way around. At least, that’s the way it should be for both the story and the genre’s sake. Remember that Karl Marx warned us against turning a division of labour into a division of labourers. As a reader, I never gave genre classifications a damn. Today it is Harold Robbins, tomorrow Søren Kierkegaard. I hold the same philosophy as a writer. What I really try to do is write stories that only I can write.
Do you believe in the discipline of writing workshops?
Yes, I do. Writing workshops aren’t in the business of making good writers. They’re in the business of making “bad” readers. Good readers have a problem. For them, text has become invisible. They immerse easily. A writing workshop can help wake them up from the Matrix, so to speak.
If you’re going to be a fiction writer, you’ll have to lose your innocent appreciation of stories. A writing workshop is the snake in the garden.
Suneetha Balakrishnan is a an independent journalist, editor, writer and bi-lingual translator. She works out of her home in Thiruvananthapuram.
